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Bipolar Disorder: Nurse Not Disabled, Errors Were Grounds for Firing, Court Says
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
Quick Summary: The nurse wanted a less stressful nursing position, which meant she herself believed she was not foreclosed from working as a nurse.
The nurse’s bipolar disorder and the medication prescribed to treat it reportedly left her fatigued, incapable of working a sixteen-hour shift and unable to deal with stressful situations.
However, this impairment is not a disability as contemplated by the Americans With Disabilities Act. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, TEXAS, 1998.
A nurse working in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit came under fire for negligence in her charting and for unsafe nursing practices with respect to infants in her care.
According to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas she transcribed an order for 5 mg of phenobarbital as 20 mg, transcribed a feeding order for 6.7 cc q 3 hours as q 1 hour, crossed up a patient’s venous and arterial lines and failed to do her required end-of-shift chart checks.
After a lengthy disciplinary process designed to correct these deficiencies, the nurse was terminated. During the disciplinary process she complained of being depressed and claimed her depression was partly to blame for her errors.
After she was terminated the nurse sued for disability discrimination because she suffered from a bipolar disorder. She claimed she was treated more harshly than another nurse who was given a three-day suspension and ninety days probation. However, according to the court, that nurse was not already on probation, as was the nurse in question when she was terminated.
The nurse’s physician had cleared her to work as a nurse with her bipolar disorder. After leaving this job, the nurse held several other hospital nursing positions, one of them in a newborn nursery.
The court ruled her bipolar disorder which was controlled by medication to her physician’s satisfaction was not a disability as defined by law. It may have contributed to fatigue which led to lapses in the precise attention to detail required in intensive care nursing. Even so, as a general rule, the inability to do one particular job is not a legal disability, the court said. Dupre v. Hospital, 8 F. Supp. 2d 908 (S.D. Tex., 1998).